


(move over jesus there's) a new resurrection story

by theredhoodie



Category: American Gods (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fix-It, Future Fic, Laura is emotionally unavailable, Resurrection, Sweeney is mad but still in love with her
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-23 21:51:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21327235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theredhoodie/pseuds/theredhoodie
Summary: Its been months since Laura stole Mad Sweeney's body from Mr. Ibis's place. She, and it, are now in an old yellow camper, waiting for a miracle.
Relationships: Laura Moon/Mad Sweeney
Comments: 16
Kudos: 98





	(move over jesus there's) a new resurrection story

**Author's Note:**

> Would take place timeline wise the end of S3 or beginning of S4 in my mind. Based off a dream I had, so sorry if parts are a bit vague. 
> 
> Any mistakes are my own, sorry! I didn't have time to have someone else beta for me.

Laura Moon sat on a thin foam cushion inside an old, yellowing camper. The table in front of her could be set down to make a bed, but was currently serving its purpose as a table. It sported a plastic ashtray, an opened box of cigarettes, a zippo lighter and Laura's elbows.

She'd been sitting here for hours, sucking down half a box of cigarettes waiting, her eyes dull and greying, flies buzzing around her head until they stuck to one of two flycatchers on the low ceiling above her. She leaned back against the even thinner back cushions and waited, eyes trained clear across the twenty-something foot trailer, to the massive form of a former leprechaun, laying on the old double sized mattress, too tall for his feet to rest on it.

This isn't what she expected. She expected, perhaps, something like her own resurrection: instant, like a switch being flipped. But this was not that. Hours meant nothing to a dead woman, but even she could feel the seeping time pass as the late morning sun moved directly above the stuffy camper and then slowly started to dip down to the east.

What if this didn't work? Then all her searching, all her work, would be for fucking nothing.

Just as she was pondering what she should do with the body lying on the bed, Mad Sweeney woke up.

It was not a quiet, indifferent affair. His body jerked and convulsed on the bed, shaking the whole damn camper as he flailed, silently like he was in some exorcism movie and then finally he gasped and rolled and stumbled and landed on his hands in knees in the too-thin corridor, shoulders bumping a cabinet and the fridge, as he dry heaved and swore.

Laura watched all of this, unblinking, finishing another cigarette and tamping down the end. She did not want to appear too eager, even though she had been on a singular mission for months now and it had finally come to fruition. But she was not a soft creature, and Mad Sweeney did not deserve her kindness.

She had brought him back because she needed his power.

That was it.

(It was not, of course, because she missed the one person she could go toe-to-toe, curse-for-curse with; who wasn't utterly and completely disgusted with her undead status, and who had in fact, completed his promise to find a way to bring her back to life. The last factor was in fact the reason _he_ was now alive again.)

Finally, he staggered to his feet, coughing, and spit in the sink. She watched all of this from the convertible sofa, her fingers itching for the cigarette box.

His eyes were wild and crazy, but Laura didn't feel fear. It wasn't as if he could hurt her any more than she already was. Plus, as she sat there witnessing a resurrection, she felt a tug of energy in her chest as power seeped into her bones and flesh, siphoning off of him like a parasite.

"Dead wife," he gasped out, voice gravely with lack of use. He stood and hit his head on the ceiling, growled and hunched over, bracing himself on either counter at his sides.

Laura tried to sound as aloof as she hoped she looked. "Good, you have your memories. They weren't sure if you would."

He swallowed hard and took heaving breaths. "What did you do?" His head hung and he spotted his shirt, torn open and soaked in blood. He ran a hand over his exposed flesh: good as new.

"You're welcome," she replied flatly, eyeing him up and down. After months of toting his body around—it had miraculously not rotted or decayed or reeked of death, staying perfectly the same as the moment before his last breath, torso wound and all—she had considered all possibilities. Maybe he would return with no recent memory—or no memory at all. Maybe he wouldn't be able to control himself or his body suddenly rott away, moments after it brought him back.

So far, neither of those things happened.

Instead of that, words that she didn't understand, spoken from some long forgotten tongue, fell from his lips. He was definitely cursing and angry as fuck, but whether it was all directed at her or the world, she had no idea.

The trailer shook with each of his drunken steps. He stumbled for the door and broke the handle right off in his hand, shoving it open and going outside. Laura got to her feet, hovering in the doorway as he screamed at the sky and kicked at the aluminum lawn chairs set in a semi-circle outside, and then put his foot right right through a picnic table bench, shattering it to splinters.

Laura crossed her arms, the stitches on her right side pulling. She was more alive than her first resurrection: she had healed from her autopsy stitches and her arm was no longer held on by a thread. However, she had gotten injured while on her quest recently and the hasty stitches to her side were messy and awkward and her skin pulled if she moved too fast in one way or another. Her aliveness had slowly dissipated after Sweeney died. His coin kept her moving, conscious, but dwindled.

Right now, watching him yell at the sky and kick over a rusted, empty grill, she felt more powerful and alive than she had since she'd first met Baron Samedi.

"Are you done?" she asked, once he was just standing there, chest heaving, face red from exertion.

He twisted and turned toward her as she walked down the creaky metal steps pulled out under the camper and onto the pallid grass with patches of dirt. "Are you alive?" he asked, sounding more manic than concerned.

She shrugged a thin shoulder. "Do I look alive to you, sunshine?" She tilted her head so he could get a good look at her flat eyes.

"The fuck did you do?" he repeated, hands shaking in fury—or perhaps shock at being alive again.

"What I had to do," she replied standing her ground as he started coming at her. She was reminded of the saying of a bull in a china shop as he lumbered forward.

"You still have it? My coin?" He came and put his hand around her throat, not pressing hard, but enough to force her jaw open. As if knowing its original owner was near, the coin shone through her insides. "Fuck."

She tried prying his fingers from around her neck but found him to be much stronger than she remembered. She, brought to her tip-toes, stomped on his foot instead and he let her go. Laura glared at him. "It's my fucking coin, remember? It was given to me, and then you died so it's _definitely_ mine."

He roamed around the cleared space around the trailer, unable to keep still. "Dead people can't own shit," he said. "And this is the fucking opposite of what was supposed to happen. My time came."

"Yeah, and you took the easy way out."

"Easy?" He scoffed and spun to face her for a moment before continuing onward with his pacing. "Facing Grimnir while the banshees were nipping at my fucking heels...you call that easy?"

"You knew Shadow would protect him." She didn't, actually, know if this was true, but she wanted to feel like she knew everything so she could stay on top of this whole conversation.

Sweeney dragged his hands over his face, through his hair. "Fucking Shadow Moon...your husband killed me, you know that?"

"Yes, he told me," she said, trying to keep her face as blank as possible. "And I've got no claim as his wife any more."

That stopped him. He squinted across twenty feet to her. "No?"

"Nope." Before he could ask anything more, she continued on, "When I told you to find your own fucking war, I didn't mean go absolutely mad and get yourself stabbed to death in a fucking greenhouse in Illinois."

He "harrumphed". Laura didn't think she'd ever actually heard anyone _do_ that before, not in real life.

"You, dead wife, have no fucking idea what happened."

She made a face. "If I'm so wrong, then tell me."

"You've no fucking clue," he continued, shaking his head and rubbing the back of his neck.

Laura scoffed and went back into the trailer to snag the lighter and her very own home made cigarette from the table. She, against her better judgement, met him halfway and deposited them both in his hand and then returned to her place near the trailer. He didn't thank her, but he rolled the cigarette—made with the remainder of tobacco from the box in his pocket at the time of his death by her stiff, dead fingers in anticipation of this moment—between his fingers and then he shrugged and lit it up, depositing the lighter into his pocket. It was his after all; she'd grabbed it from his jacket one night after hauling his body away from the Egyptians' place and had kept it on her person ever since.

(She wasn't doing it to be sentimental, no. It was fairly good protection, having fire in her pocket. It actually saved her skin more than once. Gods and their minions were surprisingly flammable.)

He smoked; inhaled, exhaled, inhaled, exhaled, before he walked closer, moving toward the picnic table. "I went mad," he lifted his free hand to his head and spun his finger around, "backward. Reliving all my stories. Rewritten by the minds of man."

Laura crossed her ankles again and leaned against the dusty side of the trailer, by the broken door. "Yeah yeah, men fuck everything up. Preaching to the choir." She smirked.

He didn't seem ready to play, taking his sweet ass time to keep talking, his whole demeanor calming, settling. He sat at the end of the tabletop. "I remembered my name. My wife and daughter when I was king."

"You already knew you were a king," she interrupted, shifting uncomfortably on her feet. She could still feel the power growing from the source of the coin in her chest, but this felt entirely different from when she first woke up in her coffin, or after she killed Argus.

"Aye." He paused, contemplating. She guessed that it would be something else to suddenly remember an entire history that you'd once forgotten. Like thousands of years of it. She, a mere human, could truly comprehend no such thing. "But there's more."

"Do share with the class." She tossed her arms out to the sides a bit half heartedly. They were the only ones here.

"I was a warrior. A fully blown fucking god."

Laura tried to swallow the laugh that erupted at his words. _Jesus Christ_. That would bring the tally of _actual gods_ Laura had slept with after her death to three-point-five. She shouldn't be so surprised that gods were so into necrophilia but alas, it still surprised her.

She coughed to hide it and Sweeney didn't seem to notice. He just smoked down to the mere papers of his cigarette. He must have been burning his fingertips.

"And what kind of god," she motioned him up and down, "were you?"

"Sun. Luck. Warrior," he supplied like he was filling in an ad-lib.

She opened her mouth to say something sharp and witty, but there was a twisting in her stomach. And since Laura didn't _feel_ anything, it distracted her. Mere seconds later, she doubled over and vomited up mucus and bile and maggots and all number of horridly disgusting things.

She couldn't be _that_ rotted by now, could she?

Her stomach stayed tense and she stayed hunched over until she was sure she wasn't going to throw up a lung or some other vital organ. Standing slowly, she wiped her mouth with her hand and leaned back against the trailer.

"You use whatever life magic you found on me instead of yourself?" Sweeney ventured to ask. He had the audacity to sound accusatory. As if it wasn't a good thing that he was alive again.

"Sorry to disappoint you," she said, frowning as her whole body seemed to start to ache. God dammit, was this magic blowback? Did bringing back Sweeney mean that she lost whatever was keeping her alive? A flicker of fear passed through her mind until…

_Ba-dum._

The fuck.

"The fuck," Laura echoed her own mind, standing up rigidly. She frowned, grimacing at how bad her mouth tasted. And then wondered how the fuck she could _taste_.

"You okay there, dead wife?"

Laura lifted a hand shakely and breathed out. Which she could _feel_. She had _breath_ now? She had feeling in her skin enough to _feel_ a single _breath_?

"Holy shit," she said, staring at her hand as if she'd never seen it before. Feeling sluggish, she pressed her hand to her chest and closed her eyes.

_Ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum_.

It was slow, but it was definitely a heart beat.

A _heart beat_.

"Oh my god," she whispered out, eyes flying open. She propelled herself forward without thinking and grabbed his hand, still dirty and bloody from his last lifetime and pressed two of his fingers to the side of her neck. "Do you feel that?"

Her heartbeat concentrated under his fingertips, growing stronger as the seconds passed. If _she_ could feel it, certainly he could too.

"That a heartbeat?" His brow furrowed.

"Yes!" she exclaimed, too excited and shocked to keep her neutral feelings in place. "I wonder…"

She let go of his hand and his palm fell against her chest. Not just because it could, but he was _feeling_ for something.

"I wonder if bringing you back brought me back, too?" She frowned, the words sounding obsenely stupid as she spoke them, as if she were some starry eyed girl who believed in miracles and magic. She did believe in magic; just not miracles, and not the type of magic that Disney force fed generations.

"What did you use?" Sweeney asked, closing his eyes. Her chest pulsed, not only with a newfound, steady heart, but warmly with the coin still embedded in her ribs.

"It's…" Laura paused. The last few months shot through her memory like a B rate movie. "It's a long fucking story." And then. "What are you doing?"

He cracked his eyes open. "The coin's magic is still mine."

Her brow furrowed and she glanced down at the soft glow beneath her skin. It faded once he took his hand away. "You're saying...I'm gonna have to live with a fucking coin in my chest for the rest of my life?"

He shrugged. "It's definitely still there. Unless you want me to open you up and take it back."

"No," she said, stepping back. "Don't you fucking dare."

He smirked and shrugged. Laura frowned as that feeling that came with live nerves returned. Muscles and joints hurt, especially her fucked up shoulder and her side….

"Fuck," she hissed, gathering up her shirt and peering at her side. The skin still looked mostly dead and not yet healed. "Do you have a knife? I need these out before…"

Sweeney shoved his hands into his pockets, searching. He plucked out needle nose pliers. She questioned him with a sharp look.

"All sorts of shit ends up in the hoard," he replied, kneeling in front of her. In less dyer circumstance they would both get a thrill of this but Laura's newly started heart thudded in mild panic as her body slowly regained life.

"Just pull them out!" she commanded.

He glanced up from her side, the puckered skin like raw meat and then sighed. She clenched her jaw and fisted her hand in her shirt as he snipped and yanked the stitches out. Even as he worked, she could start to feel the warmth and weight of his hand on her waist keeping her steady as her body revived. Tilting her head back to the sky, she cursed Wednesday and gasped out in lasting sharp pain as the last stitch was yanked out.

"Done," Sweeney said as she gripped the edge of the table.

"I don't miss this," Laura muttered as a wave of nausea filled her and pain like she hadn't felt in eons hit her.

"It's healing, if that's any consolation," he said, watching as indeed her skin healed itself. He ran one of his fingers across the new skin and she winced in pain. He frowned and got to his feet, only to plop down on the end of the remaining bench on the table. "What a fucking pair we are."

Laura would have laughed if she thought she could but she just gripped the table and waited.

"Contrary to what you may think, dead wife," he continued, "it gives me no pleasure to see you in pain."

"How then," Laura huffed, "does it make you feel knowing I'm alive? You fulfilled your pity guilt quest."

Her snapped words didn't settle as harshly on him as she'd wanted. He barely let an emotion flicker over his face. "I liked it better when you were dead," he said half heartedly.

"Same. Being alive is painful as fuck." The pain of coming back alive was slowly dissipating and she was able to open her eyes and release her grip on the table. "Fuck. Splinters…."

It took a minute of standing there to realize she was seeing the pink of her hands and the brown of the table, the dark bits of wood under her skin. She held her breath…she hadn't seen color in so very long that she'd forgotten what it looked like. She would not get sentimental and weepy in front of Sweeney like those color bilnd people who tried glasses so they could see color for the first time. She did, however, sneak a peak at _him._

His hair was indeed very orange, darker on the sides than on the top. His shirt was white at some point but was now yellow/gray with massive rust red blood stains. And his eyes were a nice hazely color amid the bloodshotness.

"Where the fuck are we?" He frowned all around them.

"Scrap yard," she answered, getting ahold of herself. The place was filled with mile high piles of metal from all sorts of things. Cars, appliances, construction scraps. But at least it wasn't a dump. The only smell in the air was a heavy metallic tinge.

"And whose's that?" He nodded toward the trailer.

She twisted around, leaning heavily on the picnic table. The trailer was—she could now tell—one of those old ones from the 80s or early 90s. Plexiglass in the shade of sun-stained yellow, once a nice sand color, the stickers along the sides faded into nothing but white silhouettes. She frowned. "It's a long story," she said, not to be a bitch, but because she was still processing the fact that her nerves were working, her eyes were seeing color, and her heart was beating in her chest. She didn't think she never really noticed her heart beat before, when she was alive, but now it was all she could hear and feel.

He made an exasperated, annoyed sound and fished around in his jacket—there was nothing else in there—and pulled out a flask. Another hoard score. Apparently it hadn't all fallen in on itself when he died like a collapsing dimension. He deposited the pliers back there as well.

"You gonna tell me anything about this long story?" he asked after drinking.

She shrugged, focusing on the pulsing of her fingertips as they burned and stung with a number of small splinters. She lifted one hand and tried pulling some out with her fingernails (which were joyously in place and not floating around on her nailbed, one good yank away from being torn clean off). "You've been gone a while," she ventured to say, unique fascinated by the tiniest welling up of blood on one fingertip as she successfully got the largest of the splinters out from under her skin.

"Try me. You brought me back, you've gotta give me something, love," he said, pulling another—his last, perhaps—box of tobacco from his pocket dimension and beginning to make himself a cigarette. His ended up far better than Laura's.

There were a million in one things she could say, a thousand things she wanted to ask.

Where did gods, or once-gods, go when they died? Why'd he choose _that_ moment to go after Wednesday? (It had to be because of her. Because of what she'd said after what had happened with the Death Loa.) Was he more powerful now? If the coin was in her chest forever, did that mean they were linked? (Even more than they already were?) How did he _feel_ being back? Did he hate her for it?

She had to tote his dead body around for months, go up against trickster gods and ancient twisted beings (that were very flammable) and fight and curse and fuck her way through to this moment. She was doing this for her, to go after Wednesday, amassing enemies and potential allies on her own; saving him was just a small part in a big plan. But he'd been dead for months; Shadow had disappeared, Wednesday had fallen back but was scheming like a weasel, and so much had changed. There was so much power and balance play, so much roiling below the surface between the Old Gods and New.

"Wednesday is still alive," she settled on, enjoying the sensation of the lasting rays of sunlight on her skin. She could feel the warmth, feel the way the breeze rolled over her skin. She hadn't felt this utterly alive ever before, not even during her first twenty-seven years.

"Mother fuckin' cockroach," Mad Sweeney grumbled around the cigarette in his mouth as he lit the end.

Laura gnawed on her bottom lip.

Was he still Mad Sweeney? Or was he that old, old god he remembered himself being? Could gods will themselves back into existence? If Laura learned one thing the past few months, is that the Old Gods were fragile. They were barely holding on in this new world, and they could resort to simple human lives until withering away to nothing, or they could linger for decades if one family remembered their names. It seemed like a pitiful existence.

But Sweeney? He certainly looked solid and real enough in front of her. He looked and talked like his old self, hadn't suddenly pulled an Odin and dragged a storm from nowhere, crash lightning into the earth and bellowed his name through the ears and minds of everyone within a mile's radius. She wondered what he could do, if he was in fact back to the power he claimed he once had.

"If you remember being a god _now_, does that mean you're one again?" she blurted out.

He didn't answer right away, nor laugh at her assumption. He inhaled and exhaled a couple times before standing. "Dunno. Let's see." He glanced around but as most things in the near vicinity had been easily broken by his boots, he walked to the front of the camper, at the steel frame hitch. He set his cigarette between his lips, gripped the frame and lifted.

He was a bit stronger than the average joe back in recent years and his durability was up there in the superhuman ranks. But he probably couldn't have lifted the trailer so easily, one handed. It reminded Laura of the strength that his coin had granted her.

"Did you steal my fucking strength?" She quickly twisted around and grabbed hold of the picnic table with both hands. She could barely lift it with her twig arms. "Fuck. You did, didn't you?"

"Don't think so. I'm just more...fuck it, aware or some shit than I was before." He came up behind her and _touched her_ without provocation. It wouldn't have bothered her so much except she had just gained her sense of touch and it was indeed one of the things she'd missed the most. His hand settled on the back of her neck, her hair a tangled barrier between their skin.

"How the fuck am I supposed to kill Wednesday now?"

He extracted his hand much too soon for her liking. "With your godlike determination and lovely vocabulary. Grimnir likes a battle of wits."

Laura scoffed. "I don't think I can kill a god by calling him a bastard."

"Probably not." He shrugged and settled back against the picnic table again, taking up her newfound personal space bubble. That too had disappeared when she'd been dead. She had felt no need for personal space.

She crossed her arms. "Did you get what you wanted from Grimnir? Besides dying."

"I didn't _want_ to die," he snapped, standing and stubbing out the cigarette butt on the table. "But yeah, I got what I wanted."

Stepping away, she felt the air shift like a vacuum around them for a moment. In a blink, his hands were empty and then holding a hefty spear. It was nearly as tall as Sweeney, and its shaft was stained with dried blood. His dried blood, she realized as she reached to touch it.

"And this is?"

"Gungnir. Grimnir's spear. He wanted it, badly. I took it." He stepped a bit away from her and spun it with a calm, practiced hand.

Laura's eyes lit up. "That can kill a god?"

"Yes." He smirked a bit as the wheels started turning and planning in Laura's mind. "And he doesn't have it."

She reached for it, and he let her have it. It was heavy, especially to her human strength. She was a tiny thing, it wasn't like she was even partially strong naturally. She let the heavy wooden end hit the dirt and squinted at the runes carved into it. "This killed you?" she asked a bit quieter, eyes following the line of the weapon up to the spearhead, also clinging to the brown encrusted lifeblood of its last victim.

"Yep," he said like it was nothing. He took it from her hands and before she could protest, it was gone again, disappeared.

"Can anyone else reach your...hoard? Or is that a you only thing?"

"Just me," he said, then he paused and tilted his head. "Maybe you. If I taught you."

Laura thought he was joking, but she raised her eyebrows when she realized he was serious. "Really?"

He shrugged, as if the offer didn't mean anything. "Got anything to eat around here?" he asked, changing the subject and peering into the trailer that was two feet too short for him.

"No. Being dead meant I didn't need food and Coyote doesn't really come around anymore."

He turned around much faster than she thought anyone his size could use. "Did you just say Coyote?"

"Yes," she replied slowly.

"As in...Coyote."

"Repeating the name doesn't do anything." She narrowed her eyes at him. "And yes. Is that a problem? I told you, you've been gone a while. It's a—"

"Long story." He scratched his fingers across his scalp and then decided that that argument could be put off until later. "There's gotta be a Motel America nearby."

Laura thought back to the multiple times she'd ended up in that place, confronted with Mama G and swallowed hard. "There is. But you can't go like that. You look like you just died."

He made a face. "Speak for yourself. You may be alive now but you still reek like a corpse."

"Fuck off," she said, her signature response. "Coyote said he keeps a house up by the front. There may be a shower there. And spare clothes."

After a five minute grumbling walk, they spotted the house, though house was a loose word for it. It looked house shaped, though the walls were plastered in sheets of old overlapping siding and the windows were newspapered from the inside so there was little light inside. It did, however, feel pretty sturdy and was remarkably clean. It had running water and an eclectic selection of clothes.

It was mostly one big room, with a mini fridge next to the bare-piped kitchen sized sink, a hard wood table in the middle covered in old water stain rings, a sofa with 80's style upholstery, a twin sized mattress stripped to the bare bones with some questionable stains, and a bureau that was overflowing with clothes. There was a corner of the room blocked off as a bathroom.

"Where did he get all these?" Laura murmured, poking around the drawers. There were clothes of all kinds, for all genders and ages shoved into them. Now that she actually had a nose to smell with, the scent of stale decay clinging to her was apparent and she was very happy to trade in her clothes for something that was a bit dusty instead. She was tiny and not much looked like it would fit, but she found a dress that wasn't horrid and laid it on the bed. The dress she'd picked was mostly formless, navy blue and had thin straps. At least she didn't have to worry about hiding autopsy stitches.

"You probably don't want to know," Sweeney grumbled, pulling off his jacket and laying it over the back of one of the chairs in the kitchen. Laura claimed the bathroom, glad to find that there was a bottle of shampoo in there and what smelled like a clean towel. She washed her whole self with the shampoo, the scent nearly choking her.

Her stomach, empty after months of nothing, was growling at her like a demon by the time she switched off the water, wrung out her hair and dried herself off.

"You know," Laura said, raising her voice to be heard as she exited the bathroom, "I'm surprised you haven't asked about Shadow. He did...kill you, after all." Her hesitation had nothing to do with her feelings for Shadow killing Sweeney and the fact that Sweeney was standing shirtless in front of the sink. Her hesitation was not that of a shocked and flustered girl, but the slam of realization that she hadn't had sex, proper real sex unaided by magic, in a long ass time. And she knew from experience what sex with Sweeney could be like.

"Don't care about him," Sweeney said, no longer covered in blood and dirt. The towels on top of the fridge had all been used to scrub his skin clean. He scrubbed the last one around his neck and let it drop into the deep steel basic.

Laura's pulse quickened and she forgot how hungry she was. For food at least. She'd always liked sex, but it had quickly become something just to _do_, because it felt good—or at least, _better_ than what she was feeling otherwise. But right in this moment, newly revived, she actually _wanted_ it. And she surprised herself by wanting to fuck a particular person.

"Right, of course not," she scoffed. "But you do care about me."

Sweeney's face was filled with surprise and protest when he turned to face her.

"I mean, that's why you...did everything right? Because you felt bad about killing me. So you found out how to bring me back to life. And you stole Wednesday's spear so he wouldn't be so powerful, knowing that I wanted to kill him."

"You can think whatever you want. My debt to Grimnir is paid. With my _life_, mind."

"You can stop being such a chicken shit and just say that you like me," Laura taunted. "Contrary to popular belief, people actually liked me when I was alive."

"That shit don't pass over to second lives," Sweeney said, walking toward the clean shirt he'd found and tossed onto the table.

Laura grabbed his wrist before he could grab the shirt. "Wait."

"And since _you_ brought _me_ back, maybe _you_ should say that you like me, eh?" Sweeney said, meeting her eyes in a weird, standoffish challenge.

"I don't like you," Laura said with a huff. "I do desperately want to fuck you right now though."

His lips parted in surprise. "Oh, you bring me back just to fuck me?"

"I'm just returning the favor," she shrugged like this was nothing. Except that it was more than nothing, but she'd rather die than admit that out loud. "And it's not the only reason. That spear will come in handy."

He hesitated, though why the fuck he was, she had no idea.

(Unbeknownst to Laura, Sweeney's transition from dead to living wasn't nearly as flawless as it may appear. There were chunks of things missing, unlike before. Like he'd only gotten a partial reboot. He remembered his beginning distinctly, the Sun god-king, battling alongside the Tuatha Dé Danann. He remembered Eorann and Moira through his mad haze. And he remembered killing Laura Moon and all that came after. But everything in the middle was blank. Perhaps it would come back, but until then, he had to deal with a conflict of inner self.

Which did not lend itself to this situation easily. He was fucked up from his maddening spiral, and being dragged back. He'd finally gotten free of Grimnir and here he was, back again.

He reminded himself that it was for Laura. She had obviously needed him, otherwise he could have stayed dead forever. Which was a little bit of a consolation.

And he wanted her words to have more meaning behind them, but she wasn't budging. But fuck it if she wasn't right about him caring about her.

He did, no matter how much it damned him to.)

"I'll even kiss you this time," Laura added, like it was a bonus. But right now, she really wanted to. She wanted to drop this towel tucked around her and press close and feel his heat.

"Ah...fuck," Sweeney finally relented. She released his wrist and followed him to the sofa, dropping the towel on the floor because being naked was her natural state and with sensation back in every inch of skin, she wanted to feel _everything_.

He was quite literally twice her size and she straddled his legs and pressed him back into the couch, her hard nipples brushing his godly sculpted chest. His hands were rough against her smooth skin, brushing over thighs and ass and boney torso. She looked him in the eye until the intensity was too much and she gripped his hair in her hands and kissed him.

It was a foreign feeling kiss, though she warmed up to it quickly, thankful for the forethought of brushing her mouth out while in the bathroom. (Fuck, if she was thinking of _vanity_ this definitely was more than just a fuck. And the fact that his dick wasn't inside of her yet was another factor that reminded her that there were emotions attached to this. She hastily pushed them aside to focus.)

Every touch sensation felt like it was brand new, making it ten times more exhilarating. They kissed and it wasn't porn star kissing either. It was softer than she thought she wanted, but her body responded in turn. His did too. She could feel him grow hard and leaned herself up on her knees, breaking off a kiss and hastily working on his pants button and zipper.

Heart beating through her entire body from her fingertips to her core, she gave his impressive cock a few pumps with her arm trapped between them. She kissed him with an open, inviting mouth and dug her free hand's fingertips into his shoulder.

Lungs working overtime to make up for months of death, Laura's breathing was panting even before she guided him inside. She gasped, wondering if sex had ever felt this fucking amazing when she'd been alive before. Sweeney leaned forward and garnered another wispy yelp from her. His face buried in her neck, he grabbed her hips and moved her while she held on with what was left of her strength.

It was a surprisingly quiet affair; Laura completely overwhelmed in the best way to the sensations of pure ecstacity jolting through her body and Sweeney...utterly and emotionally vexed, and also feeling the effects of a new resurrection.

Sweeney gripped her waist with one hand and moved his other between her legs, circling his thumb over her clit as Laura took over moving her hips. It didn't take long with her in this state to cum, open mouthed and breathy with pleasure, limbs going staticy and shaky and calling out wordless cries when he responded, grabbing her hips again and moving her harder against him until he came. They were both left shuddering and shaky and Laura took his face in her hands and kissed him in the kind of tenderness she told herself she wouldn't, but did without thinking anyway. Her hands slid away and she wrapped her arms about his neck and he quickly took the opportunity to push his face into her neck and give her a little bite.

After resting there for what Laura suddenly realized was far too long, she extracted herself wordlessly and tossed him the towel she'd used before heading back to the bathroom to clean herself up. Neither of them said a thing until she was finally dressed in the navy dress and Sweeney had put on a shirt that wasn't covered in blood.

"Don't say anything," was the first thing Laura said when Sweeney looked at her.

He raised his hands in surrender and walked outside. By now, the sun was gone from the sky. She joined him a few minutes later, the only lights coming from the big overheads that shone into the scrap yard to ward off stealers and tramps.

"There's a couple cars around the front," Laura said, pointing before leading the way, crunching over the dirt and gravel with her boots. They were the only things she kept with her merely because of their size and the fact that they fit her small feet. They would need to be replaced soon, but at least she could deal with her own smell.

Sweeney lit a cigarette and followed her, dutifully hotwiring one of the cars since they couldn't find the keys. She got behind the wheel.

"Think you've still got bad luck?" she asked as they started. That was, of course, why she'd decided to drive. The last thing they needed was for his bad luck to crop up and kill them both right after resurrection.

"Fuck if I know," Sweeney said, rolling down the window by hand. "You know where you're going?"

"Yes." And she did. She took a few turns and there was silence in the car.

"You look different," Sweeney said finally, as they started to head toward civilization. "Now that you're alive."

Laura frowned and glared at the road ahead. The Motel America was just a mile up the road. "Thanks, that's what every girl wants to hear." She glanced at him. "You look the same. If you were wondering." There had been no mirrors in Coyote's cabin.

"I always look the same," Sweeney said under his breath as she pulled into the lot and parked with a jolt.

The sex was great and she was already thinking of the potential of doing it again. And again. And probably indefinitely as long as they never had to talk about their feelings. But the scent of food wafted through Sweeney's open window and she felt like she would _die_ if she didn't eat right away.

Which was actually pretty true now that she actually needed to remember to eat again.

"I'm so fucking hungry," she voiced as she bolted inside. Sweeney followed more slowly, settling in on one side of the table she'd chosen. Mama G was nowhere to be found, but the place still felt comfortable.

She was pouring over the menu, which she'd never actually looked at before. Sweeney could eat, but he was also magical enough not to need food. At least not as much as a human.

Laura ignored the ache of hand shaped bruises she could feel currently forming on her thighs and ass and ordered the biggest, messiest burger on the menu. Sweeney ordered a whiskey and pancakes.

"Pancakes," Laura said flatly. "You come back to life and the first thing you want is pancakes."

"The first thing I wanted was you," he said, which shut her up. And shut him up. Because it was clear he hadn't meant to say that. "And Mama G's pancakes are as close to heaven as I'll get in this life or the next."

She elected to ignore his words, even though they jolted her right through the parts of her brain that wanted to be wanted, needed to be wanted. She'd had that with Shadow, and then lost it when he got thrown in jail. Robbie had been a poor substitute and Shadow was never the same after she'd died.

"Pancakes can fuck off. They're just flour and eggs." Laura needed to find something to complain about. She crossed her ankles and tilted her legs under the seat as she sat on the edge, her whole body ready for food. Food she could taste and fully enjoy. She'd only briefly had that in New Orleans, but it wasn't the same. She knew because the sensation then wasn't the same as it had been just now. Magical feeling on a corpse was not the same as actual feeling on a living body.

Sweeney just grumbled and took the time to roll a couple extra cigarettes as they waited. He downed his whiskey pretty quick and got another before their food came. As he geared up with fork and knife, she held nothing back and grappled with the burger in her hands. As she chewed her first bites, she made noises semi-reminiscent of Coyote's cabin and Sweeney's eyebrows shot up.

"May not want to replay _Harry met Sally_ right here and now," he said around a mouthful of pancakes, since half the diner was filled with families.

Laura shook her head, closing her eyes and chewing. "I don't give a fuck. This is the best thing I've ever tasted in my life. This one or the last."

She ate with joyous abandon, holding nothing back and rather than being disgusted, Sweeney just watched her, amused. She moaned her way through the burger and the fries, tucking away more food than one would expect someone of her stature could realistically eat. It was probably because she hadn't eaten in like half a year.

Sweeney finished his pancakes while she was in the bathroom, using the mirror to clean her face. She ran her hands through her nearly dry hair and wished she had a brush or curler to make it look a little less...ratty.

(Again with the vanity. She forced herself to stop thinking about it and just leave her hair be.)

"You know what's fucking fantastic?" Sweeney said once she was back at the table.

Laura ticked off a list. "Food. Sex. Seeing color again."

Sweeney powered over her. "No more mother fucking flies. We can sit here or walk outside and not be assaulted by a hundred of the fuckers."

The flip her stomach did was definitely do to the introduction of food and _not_ about the fact that Sweeney just grouped them together as a _we_. Meaning _they_ were still going to be traveling together. Which mean that Laura's plan to find and kill Wednesday could finally commence.

(It also meant other things she wouldn't let herself think about.)

"Fuck off," came her reply, though it held no vinegar. "The only thing I care about now is killing Wednesday."

"I could stand to kill him myself," Sweeney agreed, patting his jacket chest pocket. "And we've got the means to do it."

Laura allowed herself to smile, which may have had a smidge of manic to it considering they were discussing murder. She lifted her second drink—the first had been a milkshake because she wanted _all_ the flavors, and the second was water to start hydrating herself again now that she had to worry about that shit again—and said, "To killing the fuck outta Wednesday."

"Aye," Sweeney said, tinking his whiskey glass against hers. They both drank and he settled back into the seat, ready to just have a breather to figure out _living_ again.

"But first things first," Laura said, breaking the calm. "Do you have any money? Because I don't."

He scowled and shoved his hands into his pockets, searching in places not seen by anyone but him. "I'm not a fucking bank."

"You are right now. The dead have no need for money."

"You can't use that excuse forever."

"I'll use it as long as I want." She held out her hands and he deposited a number of bills and coins into her hand. She fished out enough and lay it down on the table, pocketing the others in her dress—because yes, it mercifully had pockets.

Sweeney muttered a curse about her under his breath.

"And one more thing."

"Fucking hell, woman."

"We've gotta find Coyote," Laura said, leaning against cleared the tabletop. "He always came to me, so I don't know how to track him down. And I need to clear something up with him before we can go after Wednesday."

Sweeney sighed and ran his hands over his face. "You're gonna be the death of me. A-fucking-gain."

Laura frowned. "You didn't die for me," she said it as a statement to make it clear to both of them.

He met her eyes across the table. "You think I didn't?"

She was, momentarily at a loss for words as he stood, yanking down his jacket into proper place and messing with the collar. She got to her feet, pushing down her emotions.

They were comically opposite in size, but at least they were both alive. They had that going for them at least.

"I was hoping you'd have some idea of how to track down other...gods and deities and whatever."

"Oh sure," Sweeney said sarcastically, heading to the drivers' side door. "We're all in the phone book under 'Old Gods and Deities and Whatever'. We can just look him up."

"Fuck you," Laura said, trying hard not to laugh. The car doors slammed

"Only if you want to," he said cheekily as the engine roared to life.


End file.
